Of all the books I’ve read for The Post, none has received as much over-the-shoulder reads than “Rock Breaks Scissors.”

There’s a shared compulsion to one-up the competition, to have a trick or two up our sleeves. Prolific author William Poundstone (“Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google?”) knows this fact well and exploits it in his book that shows how to game everything from the lottery to multiple-choice questions.

Here, we’ve compiled some of Poundstone’s greatest advice on how to get the advantage:

Rock paper scissors

ShutterstockFirst off, did you know there is a World Rock Paper Scissors Society based in Toronto? And the people who compete are masters in the art of the seemingly random playground game. Poundstone interviews these men, and they are all men, to give some novices a few helpful pointers.

Rock is most often thrown, followed by paper, then scissors. “Rock is the testosterone choice, the most aggressive, and the one favored by angry players,” writes Poundstone.

It’s no shock, then, that most men play rock first. On your first throw against a male opponent, the best choice to play is paper, especially in a “one-shot” match. Women, meanwhile, are most likely to throw scissors.

The game is also not left all to chance. You can prime your opponent to throw rock at the start of a game by suggesting play without allowing your opponent to think. The usual preference for cornered competitors is rock.

And don’t be above using some reverse psychology. Announce what you’re going to throw — and then do it. “Most players figure you won’t go through with it,” Poundstone writes.

Multiple-choice questions

ShutterstockFirst and foremost, you must think like a tester — a lazy one, to be exact.

To gather the information for his multiple-choice section, Poundstone ran the numbers on over 100 online tests from high school, college and other sources.

In case of true-or-false questions, true answers are statistically more common (and are correct about 56% of the time) than false. That’s because, Poundstone speculates, “True statements come more easily to the mind. It takes more effort to come up with a false answer.”

In questions with four answers as options, the second answer (b) tends to be the most common, favored 28% of the time (3% higher than sheer randomness would allow). But if the test has five options, the last answer (e) is most common, favored 23% of the time, compared to the least-favorite answer (c), which is right only 17% of the time.

Though answers with the words “never, always, all or none” are rarely right, if there is the option “none of the above” or “all of the above” they are the ones to pick. In his research, he found that these answers are correct a shocking 52% of the time.

Another way to narrow down options is to pick the longest answers because true answers need to be indisputably correct, and this demands some “qualifying language.”

The lottery

ReutersPoundstone can’t help you improve your odds, but he can help you get a bigger payout.

The most important thing you can do is to pick unpopular numbers. This means avoiding anything with 7, which is chosen almost 50% more than average, and 13, which is also a popular pick despite its bad-luck reputation.

Unpopular numbers include numbers ending with 0, 8 or 9 and anything over 31 (many people use significant dates, such as month and day of anniversaries).

In chronological order, here are the most unpopular lotto numbers, all of which are about 15% to 30% less popular than average: 10, 20, 29, 30, 32, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 48, 50, 51, 52, 58, 59.
The more unpopular numbers you use, the less of a chance you’ll have to share your pot if you win.

To make full use of this strategy, he suggests writing the numbers on an index cards, shuffling them and drawing the numbers so they remain completely random.

Football bets

Proposition bets for the Super Bowl are posted at the race and sports book in the Las Vegas Hilton.Reuters

This is for bookie betting — not office pools (though he does have a section on this, in which he advocates for the “Evil Twin” method).

Betting with a bookie entails an entirely different approach, which he calls the “underdog strategy,” which was refined by two economists at the University of Wyoming.

For this, you bet on the team expected to lose when they play a home game. The research says that if you wagered on home underdog teams, you would have won 53.3% of the time in the NFL over 21 seasons from 1980 to 2001; and 53.1% of the time in NCAA football games in the 2002 season.

This might not sound like exciting odds (it hardly covers the bookie fee), but if you bet smart, you can increase your winnings. The economists described another strategy: Only bet on an underdog when the spread is at least 6.5 points, and bet on an underdog visiting team when the spread is at least 10.5 points. On average, about two NFL teams per week will meet this criteria.

Bet less often but more carefully, and Poundstone says it’s possible to achieve a win rate as high as 60%.